In Gut Feelings: Short Cuts to Better Decision Making psychologist and behavioural expert Gerd Gigerenzer reveals the secrets of fast and effective decision-making. A sportsman can catch a ball without calculating its speed or distance. A group of amateurs beat the experts at playing the stock market. A man falls for the right woman even though she's 'wrong' on paper. All these people succeeded by trusting their instincts - but how does it work? As Gerd Gigerenzer explains, in an uncertain world, sometimes we have to ignore too much information and rely on our brain's 'short cut', or heuristic. By explaining how intuition works and analyzing the techniques that people use to make good decisions - whether it's in personnel selection or heart surgery - Gigerenzer will show you the hidden intelligence of the unconscious mind. 'Fascinating and provocative ... Gut Feelings may well be the recipe for a simpler, less stressful life' Sunday Times 'Gigerenzer's writing is catchily optimistic and slyly funny ... Devilish' Steven Poole, Guardian 'The science behind the phenomenon cited in the bestseller Blink ... useful and clearly written' Business Week 'Gigerenzer is brilliant' Stephen Pinker Gerd Gigerenzer is Director of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and former Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. He has published two academic books on heuristics, Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart and Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox as well as a popular science book, Reckoning with Risk.

Synopsis

Think less - and know more. A sportsman can catch a ball without calculating its speed or distance. A group of amateurs beat the experts at playing the stock market. A man falls for the right woman even though she's 'wrong' on paper. All these people succeeded by trusting their instincts - but how does it work? In "Gut Feelings" psychologist and behavioral expert Gerd Gigerenzer reveals the secrets of fast and effective decision-making. He explains that, in an uncertain world, sometimes we have to ignore too much information and rely on our brain's 'short cut', or heuristic. By explaining how intuition works and analyzing the techniques that people use to make good decisions - whether it's in personnel selection or heart surgery - Gigerenzer will show you why gut thinking can change your world.

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More and more evidence comes to the surface that many of our most important decisions such as which partner to marry, how to invest money etc. are not taken by the conscious (rational) brain, but by the unconscious brain, also referred to as gut feelings. These unconscious decisions are mostly much better than the conscious, rational decisions and I was curious how the unconscious brain would be able to achieve such a feat. The author is professor at a Max Planck institute, one of the most prestigious institutions in Germany and studies just that. He starts with an example how to catch a base ball. The rational approach would be to look at the trajectory and calculate where the ball will land. However, this is a complicated calculation and involves factors like wind speed and smoothness of the surface of the ball. In practise, good players don't do this, but unconsciously move such that they keep the ball at constant angle with respect to the horizon. No complicated calculations are involved and the success rate of catching is much higher. Many decisions depend on what will happen in the future: what will stock prices or housing prices do, which soccer team will win the competition? Usually very little data points are present and statistical methods are not very predictive. It turns out that our unconsious brain has some very simple rules of thumb, which are as good or even better as complicated statistical methods. In a competition by a major financial magazine, by just asking 100 people on the street which companies they knew, the author got a much better stock portfolio than the chief editor of the journal, who knew all the ins and outs of the companies involved. So buying what you know is basically a good strategy and almost all people follow this.Lesen Sie weiter... ›

"Gut Feelings" is a work aimed at a more general audience. Gerd Gigerenzer has written a number of academic works on the subject of this book; these would not be as readily accessible to a larger audience.

Since I find his scientific works most intriguing, I think that this specific book is apt to be most interesting for readers. It deals with a subject relevant to the recent best seller "The Black Swan." It makes for a nice comparison to read both volumes. Both authors speak to the poor record, for example, of stock analysts in predicting what stocks do well and what do not do well. However, their analyses march in different directions.

The dusk jacket notes the central focus of the work: "How does intuition work? What lies behind our moral behavior if not reflection and reasoning? How can simple `rules of thumb' help amateurs beat the stock market, outfielders catch a fly ball, parents choose a school, or lovers choose a mate?"

The main argument of the author is that the evolutionary process has led humans to develop "rules of thumb" or "heuristics" that tend to lead to efficient decision making processes. Does statistical analysis give better results than heuristics? Not necessarily, says the author.

What are these "shortcuts"? For instance, what if you are in a decision making situation and you need to respond to someone who may cause you problems or cooperate with you? The evidence suggests the value of a specific game with rules. As Gigerenzer puts it (page 62):

In plain English: If you are in competition with someone, at first cooperate. If they cooperate, you would continue cooperating. If they double cross you (don't cooperate), retaliate. Over time, according to a variety of studies, this works better than always double crossing people or always cooperating.

Other heuristics: "Take the first." That is, if your first cue suggests one decision over another, go with it, even if you are ignoring other information. If there is no advantage on the first cue, go to a second one. If one option is better, go with it. In short, satisfice; select the first option that seems to work. Others are discussed as well.

The book seems to digress a bit when it gets to moral behavior and social instincts.

Nonetheless, a thought-provoking work that is accessible to interested readers. Well worth looking at.

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Why We Do What We Do: An Intelligent and Genuinely Informative Account20. September 2007

Von
Dr. Richard G. Petty
- Veröffentlicht auf Amazon.com

Format: Gebundene Ausgabe

I once saw some slow motion film of some world-class cricketers. Some of the best batsmen closed their eyes in the face of a ball hurtling towards them at over 100 miles per hour. Yet they still hit the ball with remarkable accuracy. There are similar puzzles in baseball. You can describe the trajectory of the ball with all kinds of clever mathematics, but the clever outfielder knows little about such arcane mysteries. He watches the flight of the ball and automatically keeps the angle between his eyes and the ball constant.

A neuroscientist consulting with a major car manufacturer showed them a way to develop a very simple proximity sensor based on the nervous system of a locust. When locusts swarm, they somehow avoid bumping into each other. It turns out that the circuit involves only four neurons. But saves the locusts - and weekend motorists - an ocean of hurt.

The cricketer, the baseball player and the locust represent three examples of ways in which the nervous system uses simple rules to allow us to functions in complex situations. If we had to use all of our brainpower to solve every problem we would never get out of bed.

Gerd Gigerenzer is a well-known and influential figure in neuroscience: he directs the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Plank Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany. He is a superb presenter who is much in demand at major international conferences and he has won numerous awards including the American Association for the Advancement of Science Prize for Behavioral Science Research. He is also the author of the seminal work: Adaptive Thinking: Rationality in the Real World (Evolution and Cognition Series).

In this book he discusses the way in which simple rules form the basis of much of what goes on beneath the level of conscious awareness and may also form the basis of intuition.

I slightly disagree with this last point: what Gerd is really talking about is instinct rather than intuition.

The publicity surrounding this new book makes much of Gerd's role in providing some of the science and theoretical underpinning of Malcolm Gladwell's excellent book and perennial favorite: Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. On this occasion the marketers have got it right.

Gerd Gigerenzer illustrates his book with many fascinating examples that show the accuracy of instinct. He also makes an important and often-overlooked point: instinctual decisions are not impulsive: they have their own brain-based rationale. The rules and principles that guide instinct are unsophisticated but surprisingly accurate. This is why people can often make good choices on topics outside their area of expertise. I have seen this with top level scientists and marketers, who can look at something about which they know very little, but still come up with remarkably perceptive answers. There has also been much recent discussion about the success of private investors who pick their own stocks and shares, when compared with professionals. He argues that what we feel in our gut is informed by a brain that relies upon thousands of years of experience.

Since this book went to press, more empirical data has come out that suggests that he is right when he says that reason may no be the best decision-making tool at our disposal. That most certainly does not mean that we should trade in our brains for our feelings. It may indeed be that complex decisions are best made using unconscious processes, but we still need to use reason to see if we have come up with the right answer!

Gerd writes extremely well, and his style is fluent and engaging. Particularly commendable is someone whose first language is not English. Many of the examples that he chooses have immediate applications in our own lives.

Very highly recommended.

Richard G. Petty, MD, author of Healing, Meaning and Purpose: The Magical Power of the Emerging Laws of Life

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Truly interesting, but it's a one-insight book that gets repetitive.22. Januar 2008

Von
M. Strong
- Veröffentlicht auf Amazon.com

Format: Gebundene Ausgabe
Verifizierter Kauf

This is a solid book, based on a very interesting insight: that in a lot of cases, more information doesn't lead to better decisions, but worse ones. As it turns out, the additional information only serves to obscure our view of the most important factor in the decision. This isn't just true for fallible human brains, but also when all the data is plugged into a computer for a big, nasty regression equation.

Cool, huh?

So why not five stars?

Because the book peaks in the first two chapters as Gerd Gigerenzer (truly one of the all-time great author names) very clearly explains his insight to you using the fascinating concept of how humans catch a fly ball. (Hint: it isn't by doing all sorts of subconscious calculations about speed and trajectory)

From there on out, it's just one example after another of the same concept. By chapter four, when new examples get introduced, you're already projecting out exactly how people traditionally view it and how Gigerenzer's research shows things actually work. The good news is that shows Gigerenzer is a good teacher; the bad news is that the book is clearly too long.

So I'd highly recommend this first two or three chapters of this book to learn about Gigerenzer's very interesting, counter-intuitive and well-explained insight. As soon as you feel like you get the idea, though, I'd move on to your next book - you won't be missing any new ideas.

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A little knowledge is a good thing, but a whole lot is best17. Oktober 2008

Von
Jeff Kelleher
- Veröffentlicht auf Amazon.com

Format: Taschenbuch

We seldom have full information, and we seldom have enough time to deliberate. Pure reason, in other words, is impractical in a bustling world. But we must decide, every hour, matters that affect us. So we exercise our gut feelings.

What is intuition, and where do we get it? Its very nature makes it elusive. Gigerenzer's contribution is to try to answer these hard questions.

The archetype is the fielder chasing a fly ball. A logical solution would require an intricate calculation of speed, distance, motion, and trajectory. No time. So the fielder applies an instinctive rule that he has learned from having chased thousands of fly balls: "keep the ball at a constant bearing from yourself". (Mariners, by the way, apply the rule consciously: a moving ship at constant bearing will hit you.) It works.

Such rules of thumb work in millions of other applications, from the mundane ("pick the stocks of companies you recognize") to the potentially deadly (heart attack or heartburn? Five simple one-at-a-time questions will yield a more reliable answer than a 50-variable formula that tries to account for everything).

Intuition is simply the mind filling in blanks. It has learned to do this from a combination of evolution and experience. For example, thousand of years of evolution have fixed in our minds that most light comes from above. Therefore, when we view circles drawn on a flat sheet, top-shaded circles appear as indentations, bottom-shaded circles appear as pop-outs.

Experience has taught us that brands we recognize are better quality than brands we don't. That rule is imperfect. Advertisers have learned to exploit it. But we don't have the time or ability to do scientific research on objective quality, so we indulge the (perhaps unconscious) assumption that such research by others filters down to us in the form of brand recognition. It works better than guessing.

My main criticism of the book is that it exalts intution and disparages reason too much. The point the reader should take away is that intuition should be relied on in preference to logic only when there is not time enough or information enough to reach a truly reasoned judgment; or when the decision is inherently uncertain, as whom to marry.

Amateur investors with moderate knowledge will beat professional fund managers by exercising their hunches. But Warren Buffet will beat all of them by putting in the labor to be sure he REALLY knows what he is doing. Gigerenzer understands this, and alludes to it in the book, but the point is obscurely made.

For the good of society, reason must always trump intuition in the long run. Most of the lousiest episodes in history are the result of applied intuition, from the impaling of Christians, to the burning of witches, to the bleeding of the diseased. Racial prejudice is an intuitive rule-of-thumb in action. Gigerenzer surely recognizes this, too. He points out that reason works better than intution in hindsight. But today's hindsight can be tomorrow's foresight, and I wish that point had been more emphasized.

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Entertaining stories, no insight9. September 2008

Von
Angie Boyter
- Veröffentlicht auf Amazon.com

Format: Taschenbuch

The subtitle of this book is "The Intelligence of the Unconscious", and the material on the flyleaf begins, "How does intuition work?" The book never answers this question. In the first chapter, the author says that intuition works by using rules of thumb. He doesn't give evidence for this assertion, nor does he really explain how we develop these rules of thumb. I am left with the question "Where do the rules of thumb come from?" The rest of the book is devoted to specific rules of thumb that he recommends (although if he needs to recommend them it is not clear to me how they are related to intuition) and to topics peripherally related to intuition. Most of them have been done better by others.Gerd Gigerentzer appears to be a highly respected researcher who has done important work in the field of intuition, and I hoped for a lay exposition of his "breakthrough research". Perhaps he just tried to dumb it down too much, but there is no meat here to cover the bones.If you have never read anything about the psychology of decision-making and have never heard stock examples like the story of Linda the Bank Teller, you may enjoy this book. You may even learn a little, but not enough to merit your time or money.